Catholicism and FascismDecember 12, 2006
by William P. Meyers

When I restructured this site recently
I re-read an old Web page I wrote about 10 years ago titled Francisco Franco, the Catholic
Church and 2 Million Murders. Since then I have meant to write
an article on the relationship between the Catholic Church and
Fascism, but have never gotten around to it. This blog entry is
a sort of rough draft for the article I want to write.

Of course these day Catholics are mostly not Fascists, and
even in the heyday of Fascism (1920 to 1945) many Catholics were
not Fascists and some actively opposed Fascism. Also if you generalize
fascism to being a totalitarian, nationalist political party with
a dictator, a lot of political groups qualify as fascist, and
fascism could be associated with almost any religion.

Most Americans, at least, do not have Catholicism and Fascism
associated in their minds. The reason for that is that the United
States of America has (and had in 1920) a high percentage of citizens
who belong to the Catholic Church. That has made it politically
dangerous to associate Catholicism and Fascism in the U.S.A. Also
means that, since U.S. Catholics supported the U.S. war efforts
against fascist Germany and Italy during World War, most U.S.
Catholics correctly think of themselves as pro-democracy and anti-fascism.

I won't go here into the support of many U.S. Catholics for
fascism both in the US and abroad prior to World War II. Instead
I want to concentrate on the relationships between the Catholic
Church and the big-three European fascist parties of Italy, Germany
and Spain. To the extent that Americans recall World War II era
politics at all they probably think that fascism was an atheist
phenomena, like Communism. It is an easy association for people
who think atheism is evil.

While the Italian Fascist party was the first to come to power,
I want to tackle the German fascists, Hitler and the National
Socialist (Nazi) party first. It ended up being the most important
fascist party. It started a Christianity started, quite small.
It started in the region of Germany known as Bavaria shortly after
the end of World War I, which Germany lost. A good book with a
full history is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by
William L. Shirer. Adolph Hitler was not a founding member but
he joined when the party had about 100 members and he quickly
rose to prominence.

Adolph Hitler was baptized Catholic and raised Catholic. Apparently
he did not go to church most of his adult life, so Catholics might
claim that he was a lapsed Catholic. Yet he was never excommunicated
(cast out of the church), and when he died his death certificate
listed his religion as Catholic. When Hitler dictated Mein Kampf
the scribe was a Catholic priest. Most of the early members of
the Nazi Party were Catholic, but it was not a requirement. The
Catholic Church per se was never persecuted by the Nazis; only
Catholics who opposed the party were persecuted. Most German Catholics
appear to have loved the Nazi Party.

The Nazi Party required little in the way of change from German
Catholics. The Church had always been rabidly anti-jewish, so
that was just fine. The Church had always taught that authority
should be respected and obeyed. If Hitler felt he was closer to
God than the Pope, well, Catholics still accepted the divine right
of kings, and was not the Fuehrer essentially the king?

Much has been made of the paganism of the Nazi Party. Too much.
It was not taken seriously by most party members; it was simply
a means to evoke nationalist sentiments.

So while you did not have to join the Catholic Church to join
the National Socialist Party, it is fair to say that the mind
set of the Church permeated the party. More than that, the Church
supported many Nazi aims, in particular the destruction of Communism
and atheism.

The Italian Fascist party's relationship to the Catholic Church
was both more intimate and more complex. The leader of the party,
Benito Mussolini, was raised as an atheist by his anarchist father.
He in turn became a leader of the Socialist Party, but in World
War I became an Italian nationalist. He found the fighting to
be glorious. He and some followers split from the Socialists and
merged with other nationalists. Yet fascism in Italy was closer
to socialism, or even communism, than it was to the kind of nationalism
that promotes monarchism or military or capitalist dictatorships.
The ideology was essentially that the people of a nation should
be united, and that unity could only come through an all-powerful
central government with a single leader. The state was primary,
and the state required a leader. Religious leaders and business
men were not to dictate state policy; the state would dictate
business and social policy. While Italian fascism would allow
for no opposition, its level of brutality was far below that of
Germany or Spain.

And few Protestant Christians were to be found in Italy. Mostly
either you were a church-going Catholic, a non-church going Catholic,
an agnostic or an atheist. Benito Mussolini himself was an atheist,
at least at first, but most of the fascists were Catholics. Mussolini
made a deal with the Pope and after that the relationship between
the two organizations was excellent.

Fascists took over in other countries as well, even before
the fighting started, but the other of the big 3 parties was General
Francisco Franco's fascist party. Here the story is simpler: the
hierarchy of the Catholic Church supported the fascists and helped
to kill 2 million non-Catholics in the civil war and its aftermath.
Oddly, Spain ended up a neutral power in World War II, so Franco
stayed in power for decades.

Many Catholics I meet want to be good people. They think that
being religiously tolerant and thinking a bit for themselves is
sufficient. The problem is they are lending moral and often financial
support to a Church that still trains people to obey illegitimate
authority. The Catholic Church is set up so it cannot be reformed.
That was tried during the Protestant Reformation. What good people
should do is leave bad organizations; they should work with other
good people to accomplish what needs to be done in this age of
global warming.